Freya glanced at Erik with wide eyes and trotted down the slope to the edge of the stream. “You can stop the changes? How? You have an antidote to the poison? Did a vala give it to you?”
He shook his head. “No vala helped me. I helped myself. It wasn’t hard. One look at him and I knew what I had to do. It’s nasty work, but he’s my brother, after all. I had to do it. You can come and see if you want. Just keep your sister away. I don’t want her smell on this place.”
Freya called back to Erik, “Stay with the others. I’ll just be a minute.” She jumped across the water and leaned her spear against the wall of the house, and with both hands on her bone knives, she ducked inside the mill behind the man. As she stepped into the shadows, she kept her eyes on her host, watching his hands for some sign of treachery, but he stood back in an empty corner, his hands empty and shaking and running through his greasy hair. Up close, she realized he was younger than he had looked before, and against her own better judgment she felt a slight kinship to him, a young man trying to save his plague-bitten brother, alone in a desolate land.
Then she looked to the far end of the room. For a moment she froze. Then she yanked her knives from their sheathes and shoved the man against the wall with one blade to his throat and the other to his belly as she snarled, “What did you do to him?”
The thing at the end of the room shivered and whined, its chains scraping softly on the stones and earth of the walls. The floor around it was carpeted in old hair and dried blood, and the air stank of urine and feces. The creature edged forward away from its wall, its chains rattling, and the light fell upon it.
It was stretched and crooked like a reaver, the shape of its body elongated and knobby like the beasts Freya had fought in Denveller. But there the similarities ended. This reaver had no fur because it had been shaved with a knife, which had left the creature covered in gray stubble and festering red cuts where the blade had slipped. It had no claws because its fingers and toes had been removed at the knuckles, and the small stumps on its hands and feet were black and yellow where the wounds had been closed with fire.
The top halves of its ears had been hacked off at jagged angles, and the rest of its face had been shaved in the same manner as its body-badly. Its eyes were gone, sliced out to leave the sockets dark and empty, and crusted with blood and flies. And around its short snout was a crude leather muzzle, wrapped over and over again around the thing’s jaws to hide its nose and mouth completely.
Stripped of its fur and claws and ears, blinded and bloodied, the thing before her did not look like either a beast or a man, but a mangled corpse.
It shivered and whined again.
“What did you do?” Freya whispered.
“What I had to.” The man’s voice shook. “I took away all the unnatural bits. Cut out the poison. That’s what you have to do, so I did it.”
The creature reached out to paw with a severed limb at the dirt blackened with its own blood.
“He was your brother.” Freya swallowed.
The man nodded. “That’s right. You understand. I couldn’t kill him, not my own brother. I had to save him. I had to do what no one else could do. I had to-”
“He was bitten,” Freya said. “He was changing. He was in pain. He was afraid.”
“Yes.”
“So you shackled him to the wall.”
“Yes.”
“And you mutilated him.”
“I… no, no!”
“Maimed him.”
“No!”
“Tortured him. Your own brother.”
“No, no, no! I had to-”
Freya slit the man’s throat and watched him slump to the floor, choking on his own blood. He reached out toward the muzzled creature across the room, and died. The huntress wiped her knife on his clothes and put it away, and then stepped outside to grab her spear and bring it back in. She leveled her weapon at the blind monster in the shadows and said, “I’m sorry, but it’s over now.”
And she ran her spear through its heart.
When she left the mill, she said nothing to the others, and they asked nothing of her. She handed the miller’s steel knife to Erik, whose tired eyes said all that he would ever say on the matter, and Wren just bit her lip and looked at the ground. Freya led the way back to the road and set out west again, with the others trailing behind. They walked all afternoon, pausing only once when a chorus of howls rose in the distance behind them.
Chapter 7. Guards
“That’s it,” Wren said. “That’s Rekavik. If there is a vala left in the west, Skadi or otherwise, she’ll be in there.”
On the western rim of the world the sun sat blazing in cold silence, and Freya looked down on a city beside a sea painted with bright splashes of blood and gold. The city sprawled across a broad peninsula jutting out into the sparkling bay where chunks of blue-white ice bobbed on the waves. From end to end it was three times the size of Hengavik, and much of it was twice as tall. The houses were all built of the shoreline stone, the same iron gray color as the rumbling clouds overhead, and each home looked to have an arching roof of turf supported by the bones of whales, bears, and deer, and each one so high that Freya guessed they held hanging attics of food stores and rope beds.
A heavy stone seawall ran along the water’s edge, as thick as a tall man and half again as high. The outer face of the wall was slimed with weeds and algae, but the top was pale and smooth, and the wall broke only twice that she could see for two iron doors that stood above the ancient stone quays reaching out into the bay. A few men stood on the quays casting fishing lines and nets over the dark, icy waters.
Another, taller wall ran across the south side of the city, cutting the small peninsula off from the rest of Ysland. This wall was three or four times the height of a man, and newer, and clumsier. The stones had been jumbled every which way and mortared in clumps and drips, leaving huge rocky bulges in some places and tiny sky-filled gaps in others. A handful of men stood on top of the wall, each one armed with a spear and sword, and the only breach in the inland wall was a single doorway, barely large enough for a horse to walk through, and that portal was sealed with an iron door as well.
Freya marched down the road to the door with a wary eye on the armed men above her. They watched her approach, slowly clustering together in the center of the wall so they could all get a good look at the newcomers in the deepening shadows below. Wren hurried up to Freya’s side and muttered to her, “Lord Woden is ever a friend to those who tell the truth, but he’s also one to appreciate the art of not getting yourself killed.”
“Meaning what?”
“Meaning there’s no reason to tell these people more than they need to know about Katja.”
Freya glanced back at the snoring woman on the back of the elk. “I think they’ll notice the hair and the ears, sooner or later.”
“If that’s our choice to make, then I choose later.”
The huntress nodded.
“Who’s there?” called down a huge bear of man with a wild brown beard and naked scalp steaming in the cold sea air.
“I’m Freya Nordasdottir of Logarven,” she answered. “My husband, Erik. Wren of Denveller. And my sister Katja, the vala of Logarven. Who are you?”
The man smiled a broad white-toothed smile. “I’m the fellow on the wall asking the questions. What’s wrong with your sister?”
“She’s hurt, and sick. We need shelter for the night.”
“Oh? Just a night, is it? Planning to move on in the morning?”
“We’re looking for a vala named Skadi, from Hengavik. Or any vala, really. Gudrun of Denveller sent us to speak to her.”
The men on the wall talked among themselves for a moment before the bearded man called down, “What business do you have with the queen?”
“Queen?” Wren frowned at Freya. “The vala is a queen? That’s not good.”
“Valas have been known to marry. I suppose they can marry a king as easily as any other man,” the huntress said. She called up to the warriors, “We’ve come to learn about the reavers, which have destroyed Denveller and reached Logarven in the east. Gudrun said that Skadi could answer our questions.”